Kyle Smith

Someday, when gay Americans enjoy full equality, we can all hope their sexuality will finally stop being used as fodder for dopey, hopelessly contrived dramas like I Do.

Even worse than the hacky chick revenge fantasy now showing on channel 186 of your box.

One of those movies that comes "straight from the heart" - the heart of the hack screenwriter's manual that pushes formulaic structure to cover up a lack of compelling characters, genuine emotion or actual humor.

Mortdecai is mortdifying, a mortdal sin of a movie that’s headed for the cinematic mortduary.

Not just a shabby "Wall Street" knockoff clogged with dull, jargon-spewing trading-desk scenes that fail to advance the plot in any way. It's also a nondescript "Sex and the City" retread.

A Liam Neeson thriller so lacking in ambition they should have called it "Paycheck."

Molly Ringwald-like, Wren must choose between two guys: the nerdy Roosevelt (Thomas Mann) and the Porsche-driving Aaron (Thomas McDonell), but both are so dull it's hard to care. So feeble is the movie that even the wacky, redheaded best friend (Jane Levy) isn't funny.

Contraband aims to be dumb fun but gets only the first half right.

Coincidence and contrivance are the name of the game throughout.

A would-be piece of pulp fiction about a parolee trying to go straight, The Samaritan proves that even Samuel L. Jackson can be boring.

I went in expecting to be disappointed, but even so, I was disappointed.

Good Luck Chuck, a fungal little sex comedy, doesn't need a review. It needs a tube of ointment and a shot of penicillin.

That Awkward Moment is a rom-com for dudes that seeks to outdo the ladies by being even more insipid, formulaic and contrived than anything Katherine Heigl has ever done.

Love Happens is a weepie about the grieving process, mainly my own.

The nicest thing I can think of to say about the doc Neil Young Journeys is that at least it isn't in 3-D.

The only thing that's shocking about Death of a President is how boring it is.

Romantic comedies are often as contrived and irritating as Loosies, but few feature a lead character so lacking in appeal.

It settles for being a bland and preposterous thriller.

Screamers, one of the most bizarre documentaries you'll ever not see.

A comedic sinkhole, a dramatic tundra.

Anything can happen when Michael Cera wanders around Chile without a script on a mission to get high on mescaline. Or, in the case of Crystal Fairy, nothing could happen, too.

A thoroughly amateurish effort at capturing clued-in and smartass teens.

Actual abduction may be preferable to the movie of the same name, but only if your kidnappers don't torture you by forcing you to watch it.

Rookie director Sean Kirkpatrick keeps stomping on the drama pedal while blowing the cliché horn, yielding scene after tired scene of predictable developments as the principals keep shoving guns into mouths and screaming obscenities.

When I'm Still Here reached its climactic moment -- Joaquin Phoenix puking into a toilet -- I had never before felt quite so much like a toilet.

Oh, and one more thing the comedy of Jackass 3D has in common with "The Divine Comedy": Neither of them is funny.

It's a time capsule from a strange moment - like "Hair" without the groovy music.

At 96 minutes, this vanity/insanity project runs a bit long; five minutes would have been plenty.

This adventurously awful film is awful in many ways at once.

While a mob thriller can be as nasty as it likes, what it can’t be is silly.

Shoot ’em up, run ’em over, blast ’em with flame-throwers, who cares? These creatures are only there to go splat.

The two human leads, Nani and Lilo, don’t have nearly enough charm to make up for the deficiencies around them, which leaves the entire movie essentially in Stitch’s claws. Yet even his demented-toddler-on-three-espressos energy isn’t funny, perhaps because the digital animation is so dismal.

If there’s a single witty idea in the entire two-hour slog, I missed it.

Damonically awful.

Succeeds completely at failure; the unified incompetence of its writing, directing and acting suggest a man who manages to be on fire and drowning at the same time, just as the bus runs him over.

Grotesquely unfunny comedy.

The movie seems to think it's building up massive suspense by not telling us our hero's back story, but given that the wife and kid aren't around and he keeps telling people who ask that he's not divorced, it's obvious they're dead. The only mystery, then, is what exactly happened to them. The answer is: nothing interesting.

Grueling vanity piece.

I didn't know whether to be more offended as a moviegoer or as an American, but I do know I'd rather gargle nitroglycerine than watch this again, though given that the film looks like it were buried under a log cabin for a century, I barely saw it the first time.

State of Play is bordered by the states of absurdity and cliché.

The movie is so inept - with its flat characters, histrionic acting, dull dialogue ("Killing him is not going to change anything"), a dreadfully overdone musical score and la-la-la flashbacks starring the kid - that its clichés grow slightly funny. But not funny enough to make the endless torture scenes bearable.

Wince-worthy as Guttenberg is, he cannot be accused of being worse than the amateurish direction and the trite script (both by Allie Dvorin) stuffed with insufferable romcom banter and putrid dirty jokes. Some films go straight to video; this one should have bypassed that step and headed for the incinerator.

Williams appears to be having trouble keeping his eyes open, and the audience will, too.

With its dopey fight scenes, grimy look and goopy gore, this movie is so far from ept that inept is the wrong word. It's anti-ept.

The would-be noir Beyond a Rea sonable Doubt has an absurd story, but on the plus side you can hardly see what's going on because the photography is so murky.

By going exactly where you think it’s going, Victor Frankenstein doesn’t so much invent a fresh origins story as it essentially repeats, with a few uninteresting new details, all the same stuff we’ve seen in the other 457 Frankenstein movies.

If Ed Wood had directed "The Silence of the Lambs," it might have been as unintentionally hilarious as the goofball would-be thriller The Abduction of Zack Butterfield.

The real mystery here is why this slapdash semi-effort didn't go straight to video.

Imagine “The Graduate” as rewritten by a golden retriever, and you’ll have some inkling of the intelligence level in the rom-com All Relative.

God, if you exist, why do you keep letting morons like Walsch get rich?

A shoddy, slapdash look at issues raised by the Great Depression that neither gives an adequate overview nor manages to argue a coherent thesis.

"The Titanic" is now the second-biggest disaster Kate Winslet has ever been associated with. Her new one, The Dressmaker, is like some hellborn alloy of film noir, campy melodrama, “High Plains Drifter” and the Darwin Awards for people who die in moronic accidents.

Three talking critters sing, dance and tell jokes, and I really wish they wouldn’t. Their act isn’t just dull — it’s almost as bad as One Direction’s.

There is one big winner in this mess, though. Congratulations, 1961's "Snow White and the Three Stooges": You're now the second-worst movie on the subject.

A feeble dramedy about a Baltimore beauty shop where someone should come in to sweep up the clichés.

It's trashy and disgusting - and those are the best parts. Mostly it's just an endless, pointless drone with characters like bacteria and dialogue like an untuned radio.